Debates of Feb. 20th, 2022

Emergencies Act

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

I will ask the hon. member to ask a question because we have to give other people opportunities to speak.

[Rachel Bendayan, Liberal, Outremont, QC]

Madam Speaker, why is the member from Alberta denying the people of Alberta the protections that the government of his province had requested from the federal government?

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Madam Speaker, I want to commend the hon. member because it might be the first time I have heard a Liberal member mention Alberta in the House.

She has to recognize, first of all, that among my constituents, almost universally, the feedback we have gotten back has been opposed to the Emergencies Act. My staff tell me probably 95% of the feedback we have gotten has been people asking me to oppose the Emergencies Act. I would welcome any Liberal member of Parliament who wants to come out to Canada's most populous riding, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin. I would gladly give them a tour so they can actually talk to some of the people they too often completely ignore.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for his speech. I really appreciated it.

He is right. It is deplorable that people's opinions have turned into an issue, an argument among friends and family, and between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. All of this has clearly exacerbated the divisions in Canadian society.

With all due respect to the member, I know that his party has finally reversed its position and asked the protesters to leave, but I still find it appalling to have seen members of the Conservative Party on social media, waging some kind of disinformation campaign about the motion the member mentioned. They said they were asking for a plan to lift public health measures. Certain Conservative Party members said that they were asking for the health measures to be lifted and that that was what the vote would be on, so they had to tell members to vote in favour of the motion.

Does the member not find that this exacerbated divisions and that it did a great disservice to the cause?

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Madam Speaker, to be clear, Conservatives have been unequivocal in denouncing the clearly negative aspects of what happened outside this place, while at the same time clearly supporting individuals from across the country who have legitimate concerns about the approach the government is taking.

In regard to the plan the hon. member mentioned, I would point out that her party supported the plan. We appreciate that because last Monday we did have a chance to move forward. It was a simple ask of the government to put forward a plan on February 28, two weeks after that date and one week from tomorrow, that would have laid out where we plan to go with COVID. It is something that governments around the world are doing. It is something that would have definitely had an impact on many of the people who were protesting here in Ottawa and across the country.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member tried to walk a very fine line in presenting this caring and compassionate middle ground. He stated that he would never be afraid to speak to people because of some label. Perhaps it is because he has never felt the existential threat of white supremacy.

How does the hon. member reconcile his attempts for this moderate position, while he totally disregards the very real threat of violent white supremacy caused to the communities it targets with vile hatred and violence?

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Madam Speaker, let me be 100% clear. This party, every member on this side of the House, is 100% against the issues he is talking about. We are against violent white supremacy, white supremacy of any kind, racial bigotry of any kind, and other bigotry of any kind.

What I actually said was I will not be afraid to have conversations with people I do not know as I am walking from my apartment to the House of Commons because I am afraid of a label that the opposition, particularly NDP members in the House, want to attach to me for partisan, political reasons.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, the motion before us is a story of a profound failure of leadership. When I was elected to this chamber some 16 years ago and became the member of Parliament for Abbotsford, I would not have believed it if I had been told that I would be asked to approve giving the Prime Minister the extraordinary powers of the Emergencies Act.

I remember, when growing up as a teenager in 1970, Pierre Elliott Trudeau triggered the War Measures Act to quell the FLQ terrorist threat in Quebec. That crisis had gripped the nation for many months and involved kidnappings, extortion, over 200 bombings, gun violence, robbery and the eventual murder of a Quebec cabinet minister. The circumstances were clear and compelling, implicating the security and sovereignty of our country and justifying the use of this extreme measure.

Fast-forward to today and the circumstances are very different. For two years, truck drivers had been the heroes of the COVID pandemic, risking their health to transport goods and groceries as the virus raged across our nation. For a while, the truckers were the good guys. Then the Prime Minister decided to deprive these heroes of their livelihoods because they chose not to get vaccinated, despite the Prime Minister failing to show any evidence that unvaccinated truckers were significant spreaders of the virus. He made no effort to accommodate these Canadians through the use of other tools like PCR or rapid tests.

The reaction of the truckers was swift. A convoy was organized with the goal of delivering to the Prime Minister one simple message: Do not force us truckers to get vaccinated in order to keep our jobs. We all know the rest of the story. The protests grew and ended up right here in Ottawa, camped out in front of the Parliament Buildings. They were expecting at the very least that the Prime Minister would be open to listening to their concerns, but they were wrong. He was not. It became clear that the Prime Minister was not interested in hearing out his own citizens. What he did do was resort to name-calling. The protesters were the fringes of Canadian society. They were misogynists, racist, science-deniers, un-Canadian. “Do we even tolerate these people?” he screamed. In fact, he questioned whether those people should have any place in his Canada.

In the meantime, residents of downtown Ottawa were rightly becoming agitated. With the incessant honking of horns, shops and malls that had to close their doors and send employees home, major traffic disruptions and misbehaviour by a small number of protesters, life in the protest zone was becoming unbearable. I know. My apartment is within that protest zone.

We Conservatives called upon the protesters to dismantle the barricades and for the Prime Minister to reach out to the truckers. He again refused, not even an olive branch. Instead, during the first week of the protests, the Prime Minister simply disappeared into his cottage, missing in action as a crisis developed. When he finally reappeared, we Conservatives began asking him what steps he was taking to resolve the impasse. After all, he had said that invoking the Emergencies Act should not be the first, second or even the third response.

We asked him what was his first, second or third response. Had he met with the protesters? Would he sit down with the other party leaders to discuss a resolution to the dispute? Had he deployed a negotiating team to resolve the impasse? Had he delivered the additional policing resources so desperately needed by the city of Ottawa? We were met with stony silence.

The answer was obviously, no, the Prime Minister had not taken any steps to address this evolving situation. He even rejected our request to create a plan to roll back mandates, which could have lowered the temperature. For three long weeks, the Prime Minister refused to act and then he did what only autocrats and authoritarian regimes do when faced with peaceful, civil disobedience.

He did what his father had done in 1970. He triggered Canada’s war measures regime, except that this time the circumstances do not, in any way, rise to the level of those present during the FLQ crisis. There have been no bombings in the streets of Ottawa, no kidnappings, no robberies, no extortion or gun violence, no murders of politicians; only peaceful civil disobedience by frustrated Canadians who have concluded that the Prime Minister does not care for them. The Prime Minister had at his disposal all of the tools he needed to bring an end to this protest without invoking Canada’s war measures legislation. Indeed, blockades at the Ambassador Bridge, the Coutts border crossing and in Emerson, Manitoba have all been resolved without resorting to the Emergencies Act. What about the violent rail blockades in 2020, the Oka standoff or the Wet’suwet’en dispute in B.C.? What about the riots in Toronto at the G7 in 2010? The Emergencies Act was not required. Not even the circumstances around 9/11 called for war measures legislation.

The Prime Minister already has the tools to respond to the Ottawa protest. It is just that he chose not to use them. There was no need to freeze the bank accounts of Canadians for exercising their right to peaceful protest or for donating to the cause. There was no need for the Liberal government to suspend the licenses and livelihoods of truckers without due process, simply because they disagreed with his vaccine mandates. It was completely unnecessary and a reckless overreach by the power-hungry prime minister. By triggering extraordinary, sweeping powers under the Emergencies Act, the prime minister has set an incredibly low bar for abrogating the rights and freedoms of Canadians. How do we know that? The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is challenging the Prime Minister’s power grab in court. Here is what it had to say:

The federal government has not met the threshold necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act. This law creates a high and clear standard for good reason: the Act allows government to bypass ordinary democratic processes. This standard has not been met.

Further, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association states:

The Emergencies Act is there to address these kinds of extreme threats to Canada, not to protect the economy [as the Prime Minister had suggested].

Emergency legislation should not be normalized. It threatens our democracy and our civil liberties.

Never before in the history of our country has the threshold for triggering martial law been so low and the overreach been so high as with the motion before us. When the story of this monumental overreach and abuse of power is finally written, when historians analyze and dissect why the Prime Minister would invoke martial law powers to quell peaceful civil disobedience, when historians try to explain why Canada’s Prime Minister chose to use a constitutional sledgehammer to “crack a peanut”, as the NDP’s Tommy Douglas once put it, I want to be on the right side of that history. I want my children, my 12 grand-children and their descendants to know that I stood on the side of freedom and that I stood up to a power-grabbing prime minister.

Yes, the streets of downtown Ottawa are now clear, protesters are in jail, truckers are on their way home; bank accounts have been frozen and the lives of many Canadians have been irrevocably damaged by the Prime Minister’s failure to listen and his abuse of the Emergencies Act, but for what? I would ask the Prime Minister how it came to this. This was a mess of his own making. The Prime Minister could have listened and de-escalated. He had the tools to resolve the situation but he refused. That is a profound failure of leadership on his part.

Invoking the Emergencies Act is and was completely unnecessary and sets an extremely dangerous and ugly precedent for the future. For all of those reasons, I will be voting against this motion.

[James Maloney, Liberal, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Madam Speaker, I, like the hon. member, believe in peaceful protest. I, like him, believe that we should try to de-escalate when possible. I have participated in peaceful protests before. If I ever attended one where others showed up who detracted from my message and, in fact, damaged my ability to deliver that message, I would leave. That is what we have seen in the past weeks in Ottawa. They did not leave.

I do not paint everybody with the same brush. There were peaceful protesters out there with the message.

Why does the hon. member think the protesters did not leave, and if he was in those circumstances, would he do the same and leave so his message would not be damaged?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for not painting everybody with the same brush, as some of his Liberal colleagues and the NDP do. That is to his credit. I live within the protest zone and every single day I walk to and from work through the protesters, I can tell him from experience that I never felt intimidated. I was never accosted. Yes, there were some people speaking loudly and some with strong views.

However, did it take the Emergencies Act, the sledgehammer of War Measures Act-type legislation to resolve this? No, the Prime Minister had all those tools available to him to resolve this crisis. He chose not to. That is to his discredit. That is his failure and his alone.

[Mario Beaulieu, Bloc, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

Madam Speaker, as we know, the Ottawa police asked for 1,800 extra police officers, but the federal government sent only a handful.

Can the member explain that?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I cannot explain it. I am as befuddled as he is. The Prime Minister says that he needed the Emergencies Act legislation because he did not have the tools, and yet with regard to the simple tools that are providing resources to the Ottawa police, those resources were never delivered by the Prime Minister, as the member has suggested. There was a better way of resolving—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

The hon. member for Nunavut.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Qujannamiik, Uqaqtittiji.

This is not just about the Prime Minister's failures. It is about a lot more. It is not just about peaceful disobedience. Questions have been raised about whether other tools could have been used instead of the Emergencies Act. I want to remind the member that in Ottawa there was a court-ordered injunction. Well, these extremists complied for a short term but then proceeded to ignore this legal instrument. Indeed, municipal and provincial state of emergency declarations did not affect the physical entrenchment for the remaining time.

Do the Conservatives not view this situation as an emergency, indeed a national emergency, to prevent more Canadians from being infiltrated by the extremists' ideology?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I believe the hon. member and I have a very different perspective on what may have happened with the injunction against the truckers using their horns. Remember, I live in the middle of that protest zone. The trucks are right outside my doorway. When that injunction was issued, the truckers, for the most part, did comply with that injunction. I think anybody who would have walked through that area, post-injunction, would affirm my version of the events.

Does this have anything to do with racism? I would say to her, listen, when this convoy started out, when this protest started, it was about vaccine mandates being compelled by the Prime Minister. It is the Prime Minister's mess.

What happened, of course, like many protests, was that it evolved. Protests are like magnets, and they attract people who may not be desirable, who will have views that are very antithetical to Canadian values. We disavow those views. We have said that clearly.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Revenue]

Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore.

We have reached a critical point, a fork in the road, in the history of Canadian democracy, and that needs to be acknowledged. There is no Canadian exceptionalism. If there is not any American exceptionalism, and we know that is one of the founding myths of the United States in terms of its democracy, it is also true that it is a founding myth of this country. However, that myth has been exposed. There is nothing inevitable about Canadian democracy. There is nothing guaranteed about it. The past few weeks have shown that.

At the outset, before going into my remarks, let me thank law enforcement, here on the Hill, the Parliamentary Protective Service, for all the work they have done to ensure our security, also law enforcement, all law enforcement but especially in Ottawa those who have travelled from London. They have been here and they have been in Windsor in recent weeks. I deeply thank them for their service.

The Emergencies Act is an extraordinary measure, it is true. Introduced in 1988, it has never been used. I heard my colleague opposite's remarks. I have great respect for him. We served on the finance committee together for a time. I have to take issue with many of his remarks, especially when he said that the Emergencies Act confers onto the government martial law powers. That is an extraordinary way to look at it. It is also the wrong way to look at it.

As we know, and as the government has made clear, the Emergencies Act is subject to the charter, it is time limited, and it is geographically focused. On top of that and, interestingly, I have not heard very much from the Conservative Party on this, the act itself was introduced by a Progressive Conservative government in 1988 under Prime Minister Mulroney and under defence minister Perrin Beatty.

The debates on that act are very interesting. People could go back in the Hansard and look at them. Time and again it was emphasized by that Conservative government that the charter is sacrosanct. There was an attempt at that time to ensure that the infringements of civil liberties that had taken place under the War Measures Act in World War I, in World War II and in the October crisis of 1970 would not be repeated.

When I hear my colleagues talk about the Emergencies Act in the way that they do, as martial law or as war measures, there is nothing to that. If we are going to disagree, that is fine, but let us at least agree on a shared set of facts in order to have a meaningful discussion.

For the purposes of the act, I would remind my colleagues, if they have not read the act itself and it sounds as if they have not on the opposite side, unfortunately, that under the act:

A national emergency is an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that

(a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it.

Let us break that down to see if that first condition has been met, the “health or safety of Canadians.” For the residents of Ottawa, life has been completely upended in the past few weeks, seniors unable to go get groceries, families unable to take their kids to school and people unable to get to work, among other deep challenges. This is a crisis. Challenge does not even begin to describe what the people of Ottawa have faced.

On top of that, “the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it.” We heard yesterday, very clearly, from Ottawa's interim police chief, Steve Bell, who made it very clear that the Emergencies Act has been instrumental in the success that police have made over the past couple of days in terms of dealing with the challenge of the convoy and everything it represents, and pushing it back.

On top of that, we have the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police who have come out very strongly and agreed with the government's position on invoking the Emergencies Act.

The Mayor of Ottawa made clear, time and again, that his government lacked the resources to deal with the crisis.

The Premier of Ontario has made the same comment. The Premier of Ontario, a Conservative premier, has been very clear that he agrees with the invocation of the Emergencies Act. Under the act, I believe that section 3 paragraph (a), in terms of the definition of what an emergency constitutes, has been met. Section 3 paragraph (b) talks about an emergency being when there is a serious threat to “the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity” of the country.

We have seen several border point crossings blockaded over many days. Borders are about many things. These vital crossings ensure economic security for our country. They ensure jobs for people. When they were blockaded, people could not get to work. They were temporarily laid off. More than that, I think we have to understand borders in terms of sovereignty and security. A country that is unable to control its borders because of a blockade has a threat to its sovereignty in place and a threat to its security in place and a threat to its people's security in place, so for that reason, I believe the condition in paragraph (b) has been met.

The government has elaborated that in the acts there are various ways an emergency is understood. What we have in front of us is a public order emergency. In the act, that is defined as “activities within or relating to Canada directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign state”.

It is that latter part that is crucial: “achieving a political, religious or ideological objective”. The convoy's organizers had as one of their principal motives the overthrow of a democratically elected government. This was their ideological objective. For that reason I think the government's position that this meets the definition of a public order emergency is exactly right.

I want to put my view on the record on why I think the invocation of the Emergencies Act is quite correct. Let me now deal with some broader issues in the abstract.

First of all, regarding freedom and democracy in the charter, I absolutely agree that these are sacrosanct values that underpin our democracy. The charter is, in many ways, the founding document of Canada, even though it was only introduced in 1982. Many observers have made the quite correct argument that Canada only really became an independent country in 1982, because that is when the charter was put in place. This document, as we know, ensures freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association.

Without those freedoms, Canadians are not free. They ensure our ability as legislators to discuss and debate the issues of the day. They ensure the ability of our constituents to stand up and either agree or disagree. They ensure the ability of the press to carry out its work. How tragic and sad it has been to see that journalists have been treated in the way they have been. Maybe I will get to that if I have time a little later.

Crucial to the charter, and the part that so many forget to pay attention to, is that section 1 makes clear there are limits to these freedoms. In section 1, there is a guarantee of “rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

I hear, for example, my colleagues opposite, especially in the Conservative Party, talk about how the government has upended the freedom of Canadians. When I hear convoy participants—and I will not call them “protesters”, because what they did is not a protest; it is more of an occupation—say that the government has violated the charter, it becomes difficult to take seriously that they have taken section 1 seriously. Section 1 makes clear these limits.

During a pandemic the government is quite right to introduce vaccine mandates, which, fair enough, could get in the way of some freedom, but there are limits on that. Peaceful assembly is not what we saw, and there is a reasonable limit in terms of—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Sarnia—Lambton.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech, although I very much disagree. Clearly, he has read the charter, but there are three million Canadians whose charter rights to freely leave and enter the country are being violated by the Liberal government's vaccine mandates, not to mention the privacy violations, the discrimination of unvaccinated people collecting EI, and the like.

That said, my colleague is proposing that the reason the emergency measures act is needed is to remove this blockade in Ottawa, because all of the other things were removed with the existing provincial and police resources. However, the member for Windsor West has said he needs three more things, $10 million, a plan to remove barriers and a safe border task force, all of which can be done without the emergency measures act.

I am concerned when I see bank accounts being frozen. The Minister of Justice said he is going to expand that to people who have pro-Trump ideas, and the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance said she would like to see those put permanently in place. If this is really just about the blockade, will the member rescind this act now that the blockades—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

The hon. parliamentary secretary.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, with all due respect to my colleague who is just down the road from us in London. I know her and like her, but I do not know where to begin as there are so many things that she said that are outright false.

One point that I think has caught on among the public, because I have had a number of constituents who have asked about it, is the freezing of bank accounts. If there is such a worry that bank accounts will be frozen at will by the government, why is it that only 73 bank accounts have been frozen? Several thousand people came to Ottawa to support the convoy and there have been many donors, but only 73 bank accounts have been frozen.

Charter rights have not been suspended here. The Emergencies Act is subject entirely to the charter. I invite my hon. colleague to read the Emergencies Act. Perhaps she has not.

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Madam Speaker, I got shivers listening to the member's speech because special legislation, in other words, the Emergencies Act, cannot be invoked every time there is an illegal protest.

There are already rules in place in every province for these kinds of events. Consider, for example, the Maple Spring that happened in Quebec 10 years ago. According to my colleague, under the act, Ottawa could have come to Quebec City and shut it down.

That is completely inconceivable. Does my colleague agree?

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, I took special care in my speech to emphasize the importance of the charter. As I said at the outset, the Emergencies Act is subject to it. It is time limited for a period of 30 days. It is geographically focused. If police need those powers, then those extra powers are available, but if they do not need them, they do not need to use them. Therefore, I do not know where the concern of the Bloc and Conservative members comes from when they say there is a threat to freedom and that the government has engaged in overreach here. We heard from the police. They needed the extra powers in order to push back against what was a clear threat to our democracy, and it looks like in the past few days there was success in that regard because of the invocation of the Emergencies Act.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Madam Speaker, I want to address a bit of a local issue. The people of London have experienced first-hand the dangers caused by the right-wing extreme hatred. Unfortunately, in the last few days we have seen the raising of Confederate flags in London as well.

I want to ask the hon. member what he has heard from his constituents about that and how the government plans to address it. I would also ask him if he would be willing to support the NDP's private member's bill, Bill C-229, on the banning of those hate symbols.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would tell my colleague that I am quite interested in learning more about the bill. It was introduced by the member for New Westminster—Burnaby, if I am not mistaken. I will look at the details of it. I know it has raised interest in this House.

I have been very clear on what we saw in London a few days ago with respect to the raising of the Confederate flag. It is completely unacceptable. We have to be very mindful of the rise of white supremacy and far-right—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore.